This is just ridiculous. We had people suing and worrying about power lines. Lots of studies, no danger. We had the great cell phone scare. No danger. Want to bet what the outcome of any studies about the danger of WiFi shows?
We live in a sea of EM. People have 900MHz phones, 2.4 MHz phones, radio stations, walkie talkies, TV, etc. Unless you led line your house you are going to be bombarded with EM. Get over it. Your kids have a bigger risk to their health from the bad diet you feed them, the lack of exercise they get, riding without a helmet and the like. But it is easier to obsess about WiFi then do good parenting.
People will sue for no reason, with no basis in fact but just on fear and out Courts let them get away with it. It is time for judges to use some judgment, and when people bring suits without real fact, they judges need to start sanctioning the people who sue and their attorneys.
Bet these folks also tried to join the "Burger did it" class action. DISGUSTING!!!!
There is just too much stuff that was done for decades by companies that don't exist anymore that is probably prior art that the PTO can never find unless people in the industry come forward. The stuff isn't running any more, the brochures aren't available and the like. Look at the stuff Ozzie did with Notes to show prior art in the browser patent suit.
It seems to me the patent system is based on a presumption that it is relatively straightforward to determine prior art. This may work in most disciplines, but it is a bad assumption in software. The system needs to be changed to allow a way to invalidate these patents without the huge legal expenses involved. otherwise, someone like IBM or Oracle or MS with very deep pockets can use a patent and the cost of litigation to stifle legitimate competition using undeserved patents.
However, since large companies make lots of donations to control the writing of the patent law, the needed changes are not going to happen.
Experienced entrapreneur sees both sides
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The Cult of the NDA
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· Score: 1
I've had quite a lot of direct experience trying to raise $$ from the VC community. First, let me say that from my direct experience, few if any VC's will sign an NDA *before* getting initial information from you. It is pretty common for many folks to see similar opportunities in the market and the VC may see 10 plans but invest in only one. They don't want to be sued when the one they invest in comes to market with a product that looks a lot like the product from one they didn't invest in.
As others have said, if you have patentable technology, you need to avoid discussing or disclosing it without an NDA because you'll potentially lose your right to patent. Remember that the VC's have had thousands of folks make this kind of claim, and then have it turn out to be overzealousness and ignorance. Too many people starting a company really know enough about what others in the space have done.
So, VC's are just not going to sign an NDA unless they know you, have made lots of $$ with you before, etc. And probably not even then. This makes it hard for a startup, but you have to get people to the point where they are interested enough to believe in your business and that you may have something worth protecting, so that they'll sign an NDA.
The author is right in saying that too many entrapreneurs overly estimate the uniqueness of their idea and business plan. Contrary to the American myth, rarely is the best idea or technology the winner in the market. If you think I'm wrong you must think DOS is the best OS ever built. This all makes it harder for the small per centage of people who do have a unique idea and technology that does need protection.
I often think that software is a special case. Here a first mover advantage is really important. But then I a bit more. If something can be built by 3-4 folks in a garage in 6 months, then either the Open Source community or a large well heeled software company will knock it off in less time with fewer people (they get to learn from your work). A VC who invests in such technology is nuts. maybe you think you have something patentable. But unless it is the RSA you are unlikely to really be able to make a patent stick or afford the cost of defending the patent. Remember enforcing a patent can cost 100's of thousands of dollars and the attorneys almost never take those cases on contingency.
In the end, being an entrapreneur, raising money and building success is REALLY hard. Everyone thinks they can do it, a bunch of people try and and 99.99995% fail. The author is right about needing luck, talent, timing, the right partners and a million other things to be a success. Is the idea of ordering books on the Web such a brainstorm? It is their execution of the idea that makes Amazon a success. Is building a product for the home market for 1/10 the price of what professional products sell for in the corporate market a brainstorm? No, but Linksys and DLink seem to be doing well.
I know of a company that builr rugged mobile PC's using frequency hopping spread spectrum wireless technology in the mid 1980's. They raised a lot of money (10's of millions of dollars) and failed. They were a decade ahead of their time.
So, if you are an entrapreneur unless you are the one in 100,000,000, all the secrecy will have little impact on your chances of success.
Of course Comcast has a right to place limits on the service. But, what they need to do is:
A) Clearly spell out the terms of service. What is "abuse".
B) provide the tools for a user to measure their use and know / get a warning when they are near the limit.
C) provide notice, with a specified amd reasonable period to cure.
D) provide second notice that service will be terminated unless specific conditions are met
E) provide an appeals proccess
F) provide at least 90 days notice before they change the terms of service.
Let them do whatever they can sell, but the Government ought to make them have reasonable process and notifications. We know, for sure, that you can't count on Comcast or just about any of the cable companies to ever be reasonable and treat their customers well.
If we look back on the failures of the Unix crew, we can see that they spent an inordinate amount of time arging and competing about things that didn't matter. There were battles over flags for utilities that lasted years and were intense. There were attempts to preserve:differentiation" that wasn't very different. Battles and $$ wasted for nothing.
In the meantime, Microsoft jsut kept getting their stuff better and better. While UNIX vendors focused on silly religuous battles about GUIs and the what was "right", Microsoft was polishing their widgets and focusing on delivering what users wanted.
The Linux community is doing it as well. Wars about KDE versus GNOMe. Silly. We stopped arguing about flags to tar becuase it jus doesn't matter. The differences between KDE and GNOME do not matter as much as getting a great UI and widget set that developers can build great apps on at low cost.
The problem is that developer egos have replaced commerical competition. The developers care more about their babies and glory then about Linux. Didn't someone write about this? So, while Microsoft marches on, the Linux community will waste more effort building duplicate environments, confusing users and slitting and duplicating developer efforts.
The arguments about cso called choice miss the point. A choice of light bulb sockets is NOT a good thing. The GUI widgets and environment are the same thing. There are tremendous benefits to javing only one. The cost is a few bruised egos.
If the developers really want to have Linux become a desktop standard, they'll have a summit, choose a small (2-3 folks) leadership team and then settle on one environment and rally the community around it.
These are not what I was talking about. They seem to still require you to go for a normal patent to get full protection. I'm talking about adding the public challenge period to a normal patent, when, in their, due diligence has been done, etc.
Folks, patents are not evil. Throughout their history, they have protected innovation. It is not fair for someone to take the risk and toil to develop something truly new and unique, only to have someone elese who didn't have the foresight or the vision, rip off the idea and get the profits.
What *is* horrible is the US Patent Office and their incompetence in the area of software. They've granted patents for stuff I know isn't new or unique becuase I worked on the same thing 15 years earlier. And many of the process patents are just a joke.
Part of this isn't their fault. A lot of work done in the 70's, stuff that appeared in products, was never published. Most people did bother with software patnets. And most of the products are long gone from the market. SO it is hard to find the prior art, even when it exists.
What we need is a way t grant a provisional patent. The patnet wold be published, and those claiming to have knowledge of prior art that would render the patent invalid can contact the patent office and share the information. If the patent office finds that credible information that counters the claim has been presented, it would invalidate the patent.
The problem with today's system is that once granted, you have to go to Court to get a patent killed and that costs too much time and $$ for any but the ost valuable or outrageous claims to be fought.
Not necessarily. Many universities maintain the patnet rights to research done at the University. Just check out MIT's patent licensing department. Columbia University gets income from biotech patents. What counts is the policy of the University.
Professors are employees of the University and, if they have signed an assignment agreement, the University would own the rights to their discoveries made as employees. Students are not employees so what they develop is theirs, so long as they are not working for a piad University project that has an agreement giving the University rights.
I have no idea what kind of agreement the folks in Finland had with Torvalds. My examples are American universities and European universities may have different practices.
People who pay for a work to be developed have the right to the profits and revenue from that work. We call it capitalism. You can create works and make them publically available. We call it freedom. You may not decide you ike the works that are owned by others and appropriate them. We call it stealing.
There are faster CPU's for PDA's then 200 MHz, but the thing to remember is that clock speed does not tell the whole story. Look at the Intel x86 chips. For a long time Intel said it was all clck speed. AMD came out with lower clocked chips and they benchmarked to be about the same speed as the Intel chips. Intel then came ot with the Pentium M line and now it says that a lower speed chip is faster than the an older and higher speed chip.
The clocks are slower because, generally speaking, faster clocks mean more power consumption. And for handhelds, it is *all* about power consumption.
This article is a great analysis of what SCO has published to date. There are some points we can argue and that I suspect will be argued in court. The problem I see is that SCO has not and will not reveal the full extent of their claims and proof until this gets to Court.
SCO wants to win the suit or collect fees or both and seems not to care about reaction to their suit from the Linux community. This means that they have no incentive to release details and their strongest evidence until they must, in Court. At that point, they will either be found to be the winner or loser by the Court.
Until then, the Linux community analysis of the material SCO presents is interesting and possibly damning, but it also helps SCO. The analysis helps them determine weak spots in their case and which kind of evidence to use or not use. Will the analysis clear up confusion and doubt? Among Linux adherents, probably. These folks never believed SCO anyway. Among corporate clients? Hard to tell. Many will stay way from using Linux on any mission critical system or deeply embedding Linux in their operations until this is settled.
What is needed is for someone who owns a set of UNIX licenses to run the same analysis as SCO says that they are running. Then the team must do the same forensics as Bruce did in his analysis. The results can then be published, but carefully so as not to violate the non-disclosure terms of the base UNIX license. One assumes that IBM is doing this as we speak, so as to defend themselves. It will take time and there will be uncertainty. It is possible that there will be some questionable code and then the issue becomes where did it come from, do folks have to stop sing Linux until it is purged, what damages get paid by who and the like.
The Linux community is outraged but that alone is not a reason for SCO to reveal the code that is infringed PUBLICLY. If SCO reveals the code, publicly then they lose the protections that they are seeking to enforce. Hence, they ask for NDA's to keep that protection in force and refuse to reveal the detailed code publicly. It is what any IPR lawyer would tell them to do. Ask IBM to publish DB2 code, just because you want to see it and see what response you get.
SCO will have to reveal the materials, when this gets to court. They may be right or they may be wrong. We all have the uncertainty and SCO is clearly trying to gain advantage from that uncertainty. But if they are correct, they have the right to gain that advantage. If they are wrong and are making the claim without any merit, I am certain they will be sued out of existence.
The only way to relieve the uncertainty requires SCO's cooperation. They would need to allow a this party, who the community would trust (and hence, probably NOT someone in the Open Source community) to see the code and report to the community *NOT* whether SCO is right or wrong, but if SCO has a reasonable claim / suspicion. The Courts/juries will determine the winner. The real question is is their suspicion and claim reasonable?
Slashdotters, who would such a third party be? The person needs to be pretty technical, know UNIX and/or Linux, not be related to SCO, Linux or a company that benefits from the outcome, and someone both SCO and the Linux community can trust. Nominations anyone? It will be a thankless job, because *if* the person believes that SCO has a reasonable, even if unproved and ultimately losing claim, the person will be vilified by many in the Linux community who simply don't like the UNIX license, licenses in general, etc.
SCO can make the claim, since the UNIX IPR licenses that they obtained cover all of the older versions of UNIX that were done at AT&T as well. Just because some code is 25 years old does not mean that the copyright has expired.
Very interesting. As I remember, all the UNIX and BSD code had headers that included copyright messages. If this is the case, then the person who posted this left the copyright out (note the...) and we can only assume that they did it intentionally.
One defense against a copyright infringement suit is that the infringer didn't know that the code in question was copyrighted. Of course, given the content of this post, it is pretty clear that this is likely copyrighted and someone should have done diligence before using. Laziness isn't always an excuse.
But, even assuming the use was inadvertent, once notified that copyrighted material has been used, if the owner so dspecifies, I believe that the law is that the people using the system with the purloined materials must stop using it until the code is replaced. The thing is, the replacement must be made without reference to the original code or derivative works of the code.
We are still faced wit the issue that even if IBM and Linux folks did not intentionally violate the copyright, the community may still need to stop using Linux until the code can be replaced and possibly by people who haven't had access to it, working from an iterface spec, in a clean room.
The other interesting thing is that the person who posted this appears to have been at JPL. If JPL had the code under license then they are potentially liable for the damages to the copyright holder for the discolsure and perhaps to users who have systems that includes that code.
The only thing that is certain, as this unfolds, is that the there may be a lot of lawyers about to make $$ on this mess.
A number of articles on this issue point out that many copied lines are comments and that the comments have the identical spelling errors that lines of *nix code do. If this is true, and if the lines of code are truly owned by SCO this is very damning.
Someone might make the case that given a task to do the code to accomplish the task could look very similar or nearly identical. Bit comments? And spelling errors? Not a chance. Comments can be rare enough and programmers idiosyncratic enough that it stretches credulity to think that multiple programmers would write the same comment with the same spelling error.
The issue is whether or not these lines came into UNIX from another source, such as from BSD. If the code came from BSD, perhaps TCP stack or utilities, than SCO really has no claim. The other possibility is that it is in driver code. This gets murkier.
I don't think AT&T ever made the APIs for drivers public. You had to have a non-disclosure agreement with them or a license. But it is possible that you could replace the AT&T interfaces with Linux interfaces and had the code look identical in 90% of its content and not be a copy, since the device parts would be identical, but they would be owned by the driver writer. One exception is if the driver writer started with an AT&T driver and modified it. In this case, SCO wins.
There was a 386 reference port of UNIX done for AT&T by Intel and Interactive Systems. As part of that port there were a number of driver provided to AT&T. They are all owned by AT&T and drivers that were built starting with those drivers would be a violation of the license. One itneresting fact is that Interactive went into the packaged UNIX business and their x86 UNIX was eventually bought by Sun and was the base of Solaris for the x86.
Again, it all comes down to the details: which parts of the code are we talkign about.
They have a nice paper explaining SSL VPN's. These provide access to applications from a remote location. As I understand it they do not provide connection for a remote PC to the intranet. You get control of which applications are made available to which users.
This case presents some interesting spin on copyright law and licenses of copyrighted material. There are two interesting Copyright/license issues here. I'll give my view and any comments I make should not be taken to imply that I agree with either party on the facts or merits of the case. First, let's look at the SCO side.
SCO appears to own the copyright and intellectual property rights to the UNIX system source code. UNIX source has always only been made available under a license that protects the source code and the trade secrets contained within the code. Your license does not allow you to use any of the code in other products unless that product is subject to the same license. Sort of GNU'ish, isn't it?
SCO says IBM took some of its source code and put it in Linux. If IBM did this, then it violated its;incense and owes SCO whatever damages the Courts set. Further, as I understand the law, any product that contains this source must be withdrawn from the market immediately. The products can not be used until the offending code is removed and replaced. That means that folks who are running Linux systems would have to shut them down as soon as they are notified or know that they are using a product containing the code.
I believe that a problem in replacing the code is that the people doing it have to find a way to replace it without using the knowledge they have to essentially copy the code. It may be difficult to do this, but it can be done. Further, SCO may have the right to examine any replacement code and potentially hold up release until they and possibly a Court agree that the replacement code is free of any of their source. This all takes time, and in the meantime, no LINUX use.
The second issue relates to SCO shipping Linux under the GPL with the offending code. One of the more interesting things about this case is that the GPL is essentially an equivalent license to the UNIX license. Whereas the UNIX license asks for cash for using the code, the GPL asks for your source code additions as compensation. Both licenses rely on the same basic copyright law to protect the code that is being licensed. Both licenses are binding not just on the licensee, but also require the licensee to only license any product built using any of the code under the same terms as the original code. Pretty interesting symmetry.
Now comes the interesting part. If IBM violated the UNIX license and placed code from UNIX in Linux, it did not have the right to agree to the license terms for the code in question. The question then becomes one similar to this: if someone steals something from your house and you wind up in possession of the item, which is disguised, without realizing it and then give it away, do you lose title to it, even if you would never have given it away if you knew?
I suspect the real reason is money and an understanding of what their real business and goals are. AOL isn't in the software business, it is in the content business. It costs a bunch of money to develop and support a browser. The articles I read said that they had 50 people working on NS. That is a cost of that is probably over $7.5 million a year.
AOL realizes that they compete with MS as an ISP and content provider. They have given up the idea that they are going to be a desktop platform and compete with MS. It never made sense in the first place. The competition is about content and service. AOL wants to leverage MS's development expense, not duplicate it.
MS supports the standards, does a good job rendering and, as was pointed out, handles poorly coded pages much better than NS. 97% of users are using IE. The world has changed. AOL has changed. AOL has realized it and moved on to do what it needs to to be a successful business. They don't need to be in the browser business to succeed. They don't need to fight a religious war with MS about browsers and desktops to succeed.
This may disappoint many who are looking for a champion to fight what they perceive as MS's hegemony. If that is what you want, look to Sun or IBM, it isn't AOL any more. In reality, it never was, because AOL really never threw the effort needed to compete and to win (if that was even possible) into Netscape.
Re:Neither as good as Thinking in Java
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Head First Java
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· Score: 1
I'm also a fan of Thining in Java. The author, Bruce Eckel, also is working on a J2EE book and has a book on Design Patterns. Eckel also wrote Thinking in C++, which has to be the best book for someone trying to transition from C to C++.
By the way, if you are just trying to learn Java, I'd recommend that you grab a copy of DrJava to use as an IDE to try various examples from whichever book you pick. This IDE was built for teaching by some folks at Rice. It includes an editor, syntax coloring/highlighting, compilation, and built in debugger. It also has a interactive shel that lets you try things in Java without having to create a program.
No it isn't an attack on IBM or anyone else. Grey knows what he is talking about and his analysis is just fine. We all need to get past marketing hype and commercials and excitement about "the next big thing" and look at the reality of the numbers. The issue is: are we close to having the infrastructure for generalized "on demand computing"? Grey explains it so what anyone can understand the tradeoffs. Even your CFO, which is the key!
It is a great article/analysis. Believe it and ignore the hype. SOme day the hype may be true, and Grey even explains how to figure that ut. But for now, only specialized applications are suitable candidates.
Some corrections about the histroy of x86 UNIX
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OSI vs SCO
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· Score: 3, Informative
UNIX systems that are built under licenses that SCO inherited are the dominant UNIX variants. These include Solaris and AIX and HP-UX. All have licenses from Bell Labs/AT&T that protected AT&T's intellectual property, which SCO now owns.
SCO and Intel UNIX: OSI has it wrong and so does SCO. SCO did port Xenix to the 8086 and 286. Intel/AT&T paid to have Interactve Systems port UNIX 5.2.2 to the 286 and 5.3 to the 386. SCO used the Interactive port for the basis of the later products. Interactive built a packaged UNIX based on V.3 which was eventually bought by Sun which used this as the base of Solaris for Intel.
IBM hired Locus Computing to port UNIX to the PS/2. They used a V.2.2 variant and did not use the same code base that was used for the RISC AIX, which was developed by Interactive for IBM.
The OSF ported the MACH kernel and UNIX layer but still used a variety of the Bell commands. I think the kernel was Bell license free, but I can not remember the exact terms. I know you needed an AT&T 5.2 level license, but I think this was because OSF still used the commands, libs, etc from Bell.
In a way, SCO is correct, in that the Intel ports of the various UNIX'es all derive from some version of Bell Labs UNIX which the vendors had access to via an AT&T license.
I know, you're going to say the technology works, etc. It *isn't* a technology problem. Think of a boss who tells his people they should vote from work, and looks over their shoulders. The people know who the boss supports. Don't want to vote at work? Maybe the boss finds excuses to fire folks who won't.
One of the advantages of going to a polling place and only to polling places is that it completely removes any chance for anyone to intimidate you, since you can say "Sure I voted for X" and there is no way for anyone to know any different.
Too many people are too technical and only think of the technology issues with e voting. The fraud and intimidation possibilities go up tremendously when we have e voting, not because of technology (although bet there will be issues) but because of old fashioned strong arm and intimidation tactics. Give someone the new ability to watch over your shoulder while you vote and dishonest people will use this to rig things. People can sell votes because there is a way to verify that they voted as you wanted. Etc.
E voting is a bad idea. Yeah, there are technology reasons. But the real problems are sociological.
I legal filings with the SEC, you have to list the kitchen sink of all the things that anyone might possibly think could ever go wrong, no matter how completely unlikely. If you don't yu open yourself up for later suits.
This comment doesn't mean MS thinks there is a threat, but tat their attornies think that they could be sued if they don't say this, or if thjey takes steps to beat open source and those steps have any impact on earnings.
This is about not getting sued for doing what they need to win.
The problems this article discusses were created by browser implementation problems and limits of the earlier HTML versions. Netscape in particlar, was terrible to write HTML for. While Microsoft actively rev'ed IE, Netscape did little, and the problems of building Web sites to support the current users increased. When NS6 arrived, it was actually worse than NS4!
There is much redundant code because NS and to a lesser degree, IE, didn't do things like inheritance of formats correctly. Developers were forced to try various hacks until they found something that worked. Having gone through the pain, and with new stuff to do, the developers were not willing to remove what worked. Browser developers made certain that the old pages worked, even if they were incorrect, because to fail to do so was to lose users and gain a terrific amount of ridicule in various publications and online sites (including Slashdot).
The issue is if you run a public Web site, you have to support what the public has, not what is convenient for the developer. And the public takes time to update their browsers. The pace of update has quickened over the last 12 months, but before that you had to code for NS4.0x or some real per centage of users couldn't visit your site. IN particular, the South American and other foreign markets were very slow to upgrade their browsers. Sites like Yahoo, who are truly global, must support just about all of the terrible, broken browsers that exist.
With the cutbacks in IT spending, little money exists to make changes to Web sites that are not absolutely required. Changes are made to fix terrible problems and do things to bring in new revenue. That is it. I also think this author really underestimates the effort to build a great site that supports all the required browsers and is cmpleeing to users. Anyone can make a home page, making a great site is hard and expensive. Look how few great sites there are.
What is interesting about this paper is that most of its examples, at the end, of companies adopting and using Linux are people who are *PRIMARILY* hardware companies and view the hardware as the product and software as a cost.
Why not use Linux rather than pay VxWorks or some other company, when you are primarily a box company. Lindows is in the same boat. They sell a PC and then make money selling software to the end users. Some of the software may even be free, but end users don't necessarily know about site like SourceForge. IBM likes Linux because it is a box and services company, and you'll certainly need a lot of services to start using Linux in a corporate environment. Their UNIX OS isn't a great success and is tied to their proprietary hardware. Their mainframe OS isn't growing. Their database software and Notes have no real Linux challengers (see below).
What the author does not address is the issue of making money from SOFTWARE in the Linux world. Oracle will make money because they have a proprietary lock on the data and programs that are written to run with their database. Over time, MySQL or HSQL might replace them, but remember that the cost of switching is huge and the risk high for a large corporation. Same is true of DB2 and Notes.
And that is the issue. For new development or new systems, Linux and its various middleware is free and greatly reduces the cost of deployment and potentially the cost of development in terms of tools and desktop costs, not project costs. What GPL doesn't do is provide a software product industry. In the end we will be left with the only way to make money as a developer being to work for a corporation writing dull accounting programs, because we'll have given away our efforts to destroy the revenue streams of the companies that provided us with a living.
Was it Lenin or Marx who said, "When the time comes to hang the capitalists, they will fight for the right to sell us the rope"?
Actually, Exchange does support IMAP, POP, etc. Most IT shops don't set it up becuase they just use the defaults. I was in an Exchange shop but used IMAP.
I found the calendar stuff much over rated. Unless everyone keepts their calendars completely up to date, the scheduling stuff is a joke. You just get into email discussions about cancelling meetings and why someone doesn't keep their calendar up to date (travel!!!).
Slashdot Mirror
This is just ridiculous. We had people suing and worrying about power lines. Lots of studies, no danger. We had the great cell phone scare. No danger. Want to bet what the outcome of any studies about the danger of WiFi shows?
We live in a sea of EM. People have 900MHz phones, 2.4 MHz phones, radio stations, walkie talkies, TV, etc. Unless you led line your house you are going to be bombarded with EM. Get over it. Your kids have a bigger risk to their health from the bad diet you feed them, the lack of exercise they get, riding without a helmet and the like. But it is easier to obsess about WiFi then do good parenting.
People will sue for no reason, with no basis in fact but just on fear and out Courts let them get away with it. It is time for judges to use some judgment, and when people bring suits without real fact, they judges need to start sanctioning the people who sue and their attorneys.
Bet these folks also tried to join the "Burger did it" class action. DISGUSTING!!!!
There is just too much stuff that was done for decades by companies that don't exist anymore that is probably prior art that the PTO can never find unless people in the industry come forward. The stuff isn't running any more, the brochures aren't available and the like. Look at the stuff Ozzie did with Notes to show prior art in the browser patent suit.
It seems to me the patent system is based on a presumption that it is relatively straightforward to determine prior art. This may work in most disciplines, but it is a bad assumption in software. The system needs to be changed to allow a way to invalidate these patents without the huge legal expenses involved. otherwise, someone like IBM or Oracle or MS with very deep pockets can use a patent and the cost of litigation to stifle legitimate competition using undeserved patents.
However, since large companies make lots of donations to control the writing of the patent law, the needed changes are not going to happen.
I've had quite a lot of direct experience trying to raise $$ from the VC community. First, let me say that from my direct experience, few if any VC's will sign an NDA *before* getting initial information from you. It is pretty common for many folks to see similar opportunities in the market and the VC may see 10 plans but invest in only one. They don't want to be sued when the one they invest in comes to market with a product that looks a lot like the product from one they didn't invest in.
As others have said, if you have patentable technology, you need to avoid discussing or disclosing it without an NDA because you'll potentially lose your right to patent. Remember that the VC's have had thousands of folks make this kind of claim, and then have it turn out to be overzealousness and ignorance. Too many people starting a company really know enough about what others in the space have done.
So, VC's are just not going to sign an NDA unless they know you, have made lots of $$ with you before, etc. And probably not even then. This makes it hard for a startup, but you have to get people to the point where they are interested enough to believe in your business and that you may have something worth protecting, so that they'll sign an NDA.
The author is right in saying that too many entrapreneurs overly estimate the uniqueness of their idea and business plan. Contrary to the American myth, rarely is the best idea or technology the winner in the market. If you think I'm wrong you must think DOS is the best OS ever built. This all makes it harder for the small per centage of people who do have a unique idea and technology that does need protection.
I often think that software is a special case. Here a first mover advantage is really important. But then I a bit more. If something can be built by 3-4 folks in a garage in 6 months, then either the Open Source community or a large well heeled software company will knock it off in less time with fewer people (they get to learn from your work). A VC who invests in such technology is nuts. maybe you think you have something patentable. But unless it is the RSA you are unlikely to really be able to make a patent stick or afford the cost of defending the patent. Remember enforcing a patent can cost 100's of thousands of dollars and the attorneys almost never take those cases on contingency.
In the end, being an entrapreneur, raising money and building success is REALLY hard. Everyone thinks they can do it, a bunch of people try and and 99.99995% fail. The author is right about needing luck, talent, timing, the right partners and a million other things to be a success. Is the idea of ordering books on the Web such a brainstorm? It is their execution of the idea that makes Amazon a success. Is building a product for the home market for 1/10 the price of what professional products sell for in the corporate market a brainstorm? No, but Linksys and DLink seem to be doing well.
I know of a company that builr rugged mobile PC's using frequency hopping spread spectrum wireless technology in the mid 1980's. They raised a lot of money (10's of millions of dollars) and failed. They were a decade ahead of their time.
So, if you are an entrapreneur unless you are the one in 100,000,000, all the secrecy will have little impact on your chances of success.
Of course Comcast has a right to place limits on the service. But, what they need to do is:
A) Clearly spell out the terms of service. What is "abuse".
B) provide the tools for a user to measure their use and know / get a warning when they are near the limit.
C) provide notice, with a specified amd reasonable period to cure.
D) provide second notice that service will be terminated unless specific conditions are met
E) provide an appeals proccess
F) provide at least 90 days notice before they change the terms of service.
Let them do whatever they can sell, but the Government ought to make them have reasonable process and notifications. We know, for sure, that you can't count on Comcast or just about any of the cable companies to ever be reasonable and treat their customers well.
If we look back on the failures of the Unix crew, we can see that they spent an inordinate amount of time arging and competing about things that didn't matter. There were battles over flags for utilities that lasted years and were intense. There were attempts to preserve :differentiation" that wasn't very different. Battles and $$ wasted for nothing.
In the meantime, Microsoft jsut kept getting their stuff better and better. While UNIX vendors focused on silly religuous battles about GUIs and the what was "right", Microsoft was polishing their widgets and focusing on delivering what users wanted.
The Linux community is doing it as well. Wars about KDE versus GNOMe. Silly. We stopped arguing about flags to tar becuase it jus doesn't matter. The differences between KDE and GNOME do not matter as much as getting a great UI and widget set that developers can build great apps on at low cost.
The problem is that developer egos have replaced commerical competition. The developers care more about their babies and glory then about Linux. Didn't someone write about this? So, while Microsoft marches on, the Linux community will waste more effort building duplicate environments, confusing users and slitting and duplicating developer efforts.
The arguments about cso called choice miss the point. A choice of light bulb sockets is NOT a good thing. The GUI widgets and environment are the same thing. There are tremendous benefits to javing only one. The cost is a few bruised egos.
If the developers really want to have Linux become a desktop standard, they'll have a summit, choose a small (2-3 folks) leadership team and then settle on one environment and rally the community around it.
These are not what I was talking about. They seem to still require you to go for a normal patent to get full protection. I'm talking about adding the public challenge period to a normal patent, when, in their, due diligence has been done, etc.
Folks, patents are not evil. Throughout their history, they have protected innovation. It is not fair for someone to take the risk and toil to develop something truly new and unique, only to have someone elese who didn't have the foresight or the vision, rip off the idea and get the profits.
What *is* horrible is the US Patent Office and their incompetence in the area of software. They've granted patents for stuff I know isn't new or unique becuase I worked on the same thing 15 years earlier. And many of the process patents are just a joke.
Part of this isn't their fault. A lot of work done in the 70's, stuff that appeared in products, was never published. Most people did bother with software patnets. And most of the products are long gone from the market. SO it is hard to find the prior art, even when it exists.
What we need is a way t grant a provisional patent. The patnet wold be published, and those claiming to have knowledge of prior art that would render the patent invalid can contact the patent office and share the information. If the patent office finds that credible information that counters the claim has been presented, it would invalidate the patent.
The problem with today's system is that once granted, you have to go to Court to get a patent killed and that costs too much time and $$ for any but the ost valuable or outrageous claims to be fought.
Not necessarily. Many universities maintain the patnet rights to research done at the University. Just check out MIT's patent licensing department. Columbia University gets income from biotech patents. What counts is the policy of the University.
Professors are employees of the University and, if they have signed an assignment agreement, the University would own the rights to their discoveries made as employees. Students are not employees so what they develop is theirs, so long as they are not working for a piad University project that has an agreement giving the University rights.
I have no idea what kind of agreement the folks in Finland had with Torvalds. My examples are American universities and European universities may have different practices.
People who pay for a work to be developed have the right to the profits and revenue from that work. We call it capitalism. You can create works and make them publically available. We call it freedom. You may not decide you ike the works that are owned by others and appropriate them. We call it stealing.
There are faster CPU's for PDA's then 200 MHz, but the thing to remember is that clock speed does not tell the whole story. Look at the Intel x86 chips. For a long time Intel said it was all clck speed. AMD came out with lower clocked chips and they benchmarked to be about the same speed as the Intel chips. Intel then came ot with the Pentium M line and now it says that a lower speed chip is faster than the an older and higher speed chip.
The clocks are slower because, generally speaking, faster clocks mean more power consumption. And for handhelds, it is *all* about power consumption.
This article is a great analysis of what SCO has published to date. There are some points we can argue and that I suspect will be argued in court. The problem I see is that SCO has not and will not reveal the full extent of their claims and proof until this gets to Court.
SCO wants to win the suit or collect fees or both and seems not to care about reaction to their suit from the Linux community. This means that they have no incentive to release details and their strongest evidence until they must, in Court. At that point, they will either be found to be the winner or loser by the Court.
Until then, the Linux community analysis of the material SCO presents is interesting and possibly damning, but it also helps SCO. The analysis helps them determine weak spots in their case and which kind of evidence to use or not use. Will the analysis clear up confusion and doubt? Among Linux adherents, probably. These folks never believed SCO anyway. Among corporate clients? Hard to tell. Many will stay way from using Linux on any mission critical system or deeply embedding Linux in their operations until this is settled.
What is needed is for someone who owns a set of UNIX licenses to run the same analysis as SCO says that they are running. Then the team must do the same forensics as Bruce did in his analysis. The results can then be published, but carefully so as not to violate the non-disclosure terms of the base UNIX license. One assumes that IBM is doing this as we speak, so as to defend themselves. It will take time and there will be uncertainty. It is possible that there will be some questionable code and then the issue becomes where did it come from, do folks have to stop sing Linux until it is purged, what damages get paid by who and the like.
The Linux community is outraged but that alone is not a reason for SCO to reveal the code that is infringed PUBLICLY. If SCO reveals the code, publicly then they lose the protections that they are seeking to enforce. Hence, they ask for NDA's to keep that protection in force and refuse to reveal the detailed code publicly. It is what any IPR lawyer would tell them to do. Ask IBM to publish DB2 code, just because you want to see it and see what response you get.
SCO will have to reveal the materials, when this gets to court. They may be right or they may be wrong. We all have the uncertainty and SCO is clearly trying to gain advantage from that uncertainty. But if they are correct, they have the right to gain that advantage. If they are wrong and are making the claim without any merit, I am certain they will be sued out of existence.
The only way to relieve the uncertainty requires SCO's cooperation. They would need to allow a this party, who the community would trust (and hence, probably NOT someone in the Open Source community) to see the code and report to the community *NOT* whether SCO is right or wrong, but if SCO has a reasonable claim / suspicion. The Courts/juries will determine the winner. The real question is is their suspicion and claim reasonable?
Slashdotters, who would such a third party be? The person needs to be pretty technical, know UNIX and/or Linux, not be related to SCO, Linux or a company that benefits from the outcome, and someone both SCO and the Linux community can trust. Nominations anyone? It will be a thankless job, because *if* the person believes that SCO has a reasonable, even if unproved and ultimately losing claim, the person will be vilified by many in the Linux community who simply don't like the UNIX license, licenses in general, etc.
SCO can make the claim, since the UNIX IPR licenses that they obtained cover all of the older versions of UNIX that were done at AT&T as well. Just because some code is 25 years old does not mean that the copyright has expired.
Very interesting. As I remember, all the UNIX and BSD code had headers that included copyright messages. If this is the case, then the person who posted this left the copyright out (note the ...) and we can only assume that they did it intentionally.
One defense against a copyright infringement suit is that the infringer didn't know that the code in question was copyrighted. Of course, given the content of this post, it is pretty clear that this is likely copyrighted and someone should have done diligence before using. Laziness isn't always an excuse.
But, even assuming the use was inadvertent, once notified that copyrighted material has been used, if the owner so dspecifies, I believe that the law is that the people using the system with the purloined materials must stop using it until the code is replaced. The thing is, the replacement must be made without reference to the original code or derivative works of the code.
We are still faced wit the issue that even if IBM and Linux folks did not intentionally violate the copyright, the community may still need to stop using Linux until the code can be replaced and possibly by people who haven't had access to it, working from an iterface spec, in a clean room.
The other interesting thing is that the person who posted this appears to have been at JPL. If JPL had the code under license then they are potentially liable for the damages to the copyright holder for the discolsure and perhaps to users who have systems that includes that code.
The only thing that is certain, as this unfolds, is that the there may be a lot of lawyers about to make $$ on this mess.
A number of articles on this issue point out that many copied lines are comments and that the comments have the identical spelling errors that lines of *nix code do. If this is true, and if the lines of code are truly owned by SCO this is very damning.
Someone might make the case that given a task to do the code to accomplish the task could look very similar or nearly identical. Bit comments? And spelling errors? Not a chance. Comments can be rare enough and programmers idiosyncratic enough that it stretches credulity to think that multiple programmers would write the same comment with the same spelling error.
The issue is whether or not these lines came into UNIX from another source, such as from BSD. If the code came from BSD, perhaps TCP stack or utilities, than SCO really has no claim. The other possibility is that it is in driver code. This gets murkier.
I don't think AT&T ever made the APIs for drivers public. You had to have a non-disclosure agreement with them or a license. But it is possible that you could replace the AT&T interfaces with Linux interfaces and had the code look identical in 90% of its content and not be a copy, since the device parts would be identical, but they would be owned by the driver writer. One exception is if the driver writer started with an AT&T driver and modified it. In this case, SCO wins.
There was a 386 reference port of UNIX done for AT&T by Intel and Interactive Systems. As part of that port there were a number of driver provided to AT&T. They are all owned by AT&T and drivers that were built starting with those drivers would be a violation of the license. One itneresting fact is that Interactive went into the packaged UNIX business and their x86 UNIX was eventually bought by Sun and was the base of Solaris for the x86.
Again, it all comes down to the details: which parts of the code are we talkign about.
There are SSL solutions. Look at
http://www.whalecommunications.com
They have a nice paper explaining SSL VPN's. These provide access to applications from a remote location. As I understand it they do not provide connection for a remote PC to the intranet. You get control of which applications are made available to which users.
This case presents some interesting spin on copyright law and licenses of copyrighted material. There are two interesting Copyright/license issues here. I'll give my view and any comments I make should not be taken to imply that I agree with either party on the facts or merits of the case. First, let's look at the SCO side.
;incense and owes SCO whatever damages the Courts set. Further, as I understand the law, any product that contains this source must be withdrawn from the market immediately. The products can not be used until the offending code is removed and replaced. That means that folks who are running Linux systems would have to shut them down as soon as they are notified or know that they are using a product containing the code.
SCO appears to own the copyright and intellectual property rights to the UNIX system source code. UNIX source has always only been made available under a license that protects the source code and the trade secrets contained within the code. Your license does not allow you to use any of the code in other products unless that product is subject to the same license. Sort of GNU'ish, isn't it?
SCO says IBM took some of its source code and put it in Linux. If IBM did this, then it violated its
I believe that a problem in replacing the code is that the people doing it have to find a way to replace it without using the knowledge they have to essentially copy the code. It may be difficult to do this, but it can be done. Further, SCO may have the right to examine any replacement code and potentially hold up release until they and possibly a Court agree that the replacement code is free of any of their source. This all takes time, and in the meantime, no LINUX use.
The second issue relates to SCO shipping Linux under the GPL with the offending code. One of the more interesting things about this case is that the GPL is essentially an equivalent license to the UNIX license. Whereas the UNIX license asks for cash for using the code, the GPL asks for your source code additions as compensation. Both licenses rely on the same basic copyright law to protect the code that is being licensed. Both licenses are binding not just on the licensee, but also require the licensee to only license any product built using any of the code under the same terms as the original code. Pretty interesting symmetry.
Now comes the interesting part. If IBM violated the UNIX license and placed code from UNIX in Linux, it did not have the right to agree to the license terms for the code in question. The question then becomes one similar to this: if someone steals something from your house and you wind up in possession of the item, which is disguised, without realizing it and then give it away, do you lose title to it, even if you would never have given it away if you knew?
I suspect the real reason is money and an understanding of what their real business and goals are. AOL isn't in the software business, it is in the content business. It costs a bunch of money to develop and support a browser. The articles I read said that they had 50 people working on NS. That is a cost of that is probably over $7.5 million a year.
AOL realizes that they compete with MS as an ISP and content provider. They have given up the idea that they are going to be a desktop platform and compete with MS. It never made sense in the first place. The competition is about content and service. AOL wants to leverage MS's development expense, not duplicate it.
MS supports the standards, does a good job rendering and, as was pointed out, handles poorly coded pages much better than NS. 97% of users are using IE. The world has changed. AOL has changed. AOL has realized it and moved on to do what it needs to to be a successful business. They don't need to be in the browser business to succeed. They don't need to fight a religious war with MS about browsers and desktops to succeed.
This may disappoint many who are looking for a champion to fight what they perceive as MS's hegemony. If that is what you want, look to Sun or IBM, it isn't AOL any more. In reality, it never was, because AOL really never threw the effort needed to compete and to win (if that was even possible) into Netscape.
I'm also a fan of Thining in Java. The author, Bruce Eckel, also is working on a J2EE book and has a book on Design Patterns. Eckel also wrote Thinking in C++, which has to be the best book for someone trying to transition from C to C++.
By the way, if you are just trying to learn Java, I'd recommend that you grab a copy of DrJava to use as an IDE to try various examples from whichever book you pick. This IDE was built for teaching by some folks at Rice. It includes an editor, syntax coloring/highlighting, compilation, and built in debugger. It also has a interactive shel that lets you try things in Java without having to create a program.
No it isn't an attack on IBM or anyone else. Grey knows what he is talking about and his analysis is just fine. We all need to get past marketing hype and commercials and excitement about "the next big thing" and look at the reality of the numbers. The issue is: are we close to having the infrastructure for generalized "on demand computing"? Grey explains it so what anyone can understand the tradeoffs. Even your CFO, which is the key!
It is a great article/analysis. Believe it and ignore the hype. SOme day the hype may be true, and Grey even explains how to figure that ut. But for now, only specialized applications are suitable candidates.
UNIX systems that are built under licenses that SCO inherited are the dominant UNIX variants. These include Solaris and AIX and HP-UX. All have licenses from Bell Labs/AT&T that protected AT&T's intellectual property, which SCO now owns.
SCO and Intel UNIX: OSI has it wrong and so does SCO. SCO did port Xenix to the 8086 and 286. Intel/AT&T paid to have Interactve Systems port UNIX 5.2.2 to the 286 and 5.3 to the 386. SCO used the Interactive port for the basis of the later products. Interactive built a packaged UNIX based on V.3 which was eventually bought by Sun which used this as the base of Solaris for Intel.
IBM hired Locus Computing to port UNIX to the PS/2. They used a V.2.2 variant and did not use the same code base that was used for the RISC AIX, which was developed by Interactive for IBM.
The OSF ported the MACH kernel and UNIX layer but still used a variety of the Bell commands. I think the kernel was Bell license free, but I can not remember the exact terms. I know you needed an AT&T 5.2 level license, but I think this was because OSF still used the commands, libs, etc from Bell.
In a way, SCO is correct, in that the Intel ports of the various UNIX'es all derive from some version of Bell Labs UNIX which the vendors had access to via an AT&T license.
I know, you're going to say the technology works, etc. It *isn't* a technology problem. Think of a boss who tells his people they should vote from work, and looks over their shoulders. The people know who the boss supports. Don't want to vote at work? Maybe the boss finds excuses to fire folks who won't.
One of the advantages of going to a polling place and only to polling places is that it completely removes any chance for anyone to intimidate you, since you can say "Sure I voted for X" and there is no way for anyone to know any different.
Too many people are too technical and only think of the technology issues with e voting. The fraud and intimidation possibilities go up tremendously when we have e voting, not because of technology (although bet there will be issues) but because of old fashioned strong arm and intimidation tactics. Give someone the new ability to watch over your shoulder while you vote and dishonest people will use this to rig things. People can sell votes because there is a way to verify that they voted as you wanted. Etc.
E voting is a bad idea. Yeah, there are technology reasons. But the real problems are sociological.
I legal filings with the SEC, you have to list the kitchen sink of all the things that anyone might possibly think could ever go wrong, no matter how completely unlikely. If you don't yu open yourself up for later suits.
This comment doesn't mean MS thinks there is a threat, but tat their attornies think that they could be sued if they don't say this, or if thjey takes steps to beat open source and those steps have any impact on earnings.
This is about not getting sued for doing what they need to win.
The problems this article discusses were created by browser implementation problems and limits of the earlier HTML versions. Netscape in particlar, was terrible to write HTML for. While Microsoft actively rev'ed IE, Netscape did little, and the problems of building Web sites to support the current users increased. When NS6 arrived, it was actually worse than NS4!
There is much redundant code because NS and to a lesser degree, IE, didn't do things like inheritance of formats correctly. Developers were forced to try various hacks until they found something that worked. Having gone through the pain, and with new stuff to do, the developers were not willing to remove what worked. Browser developers made certain that the old pages worked, even if they were incorrect, because to fail to do so was to lose users and gain a terrific amount of ridicule in various publications and online sites (including Slashdot).
The issue is if you run a public Web site, you have to support what the public has, not what is convenient for the developer. And the public takes time to update their browsers. The pace of update has quickened over the last 12 months, but before that you had to code for NS4.0x or some real per centage of users couldn't visit your site. IN particular, the South American and other foreign markets were very slow to upgrade their browsers. Sites like Yahoo, who are truly global, must support just about all of the terrible, broken browsers that exist.
With the cutbacks in IT spending, little money exists to make changes to Web sites that are not absolutely required. Changes are made to fix terrible problems and do things to bring in new revenue. That is it. I also think this author really underestimates the effort to build a great site that supports all the required browsers and is cmpleeing to users. Anyone can make a home page, making a great site is hard and expensive. Look how few great sites there are.
What is interesting about this paper is that most of its examples, at the end, of companies adopting and using Linux are people who are *PRIMARILY* hardware companies and view the hardware as the product and software as a cost.
Why not use Linux rather than pay VxWorks or some other company, when you are primarily a box company. Lindows is in the same boat. They sell a PC and then make money selling software to the end users. Some of the software may even be free, but end users don't necessarily know about site like SourceForge. IBM likes Linux because it is a box and services company, and you'll certainly need a lot of services to start using Linux in a corporate environment. Their UNIX OS isn't a great success and is tied to their proprietary hardware. Their mainframe OS isn't growing. Their database software and Notes have no real Linux challengers (see below).
What the author does not address is the issue of making money from SOFTWARE in the Linux world. Oracle will make money because they have a proprietary lock on the data and programs that are written to run with their database. Over time, MySQL or HSQL might replace them, but remember that the cost of switching is huge and the risk high for a large corporation. Same is true of DB2 and Notes.
And that is the issue. For new development or new systems, Linux and its various middleware is free and greatly reduces the cost of deployment and potentially the cost of development in terms of tools and desktop costs, not project costs. What GPL doesn't do is provide a software product industry. In the end we will be left with the only way to make money as a developer being to work for a corporation writing dull accounting programs, because we'll have given away our efforts to destroy the revenue streams of the companies that provided us with a living.
Was it Lenin or Marx who said, "When the time comes to hang the capitalists, they will fight for the right to sell us the rope"?
Actually, Exchange does support IMAP, POP, etc. Most IT shops don't set it up becuase they just use the defaults. I was in an Exchange shop but used IMAP.
I found the calendar stuff much over rated. Unless everyone keepts their calendars completely up to date, the scheduling stuff is a joke. You just get into email discussions about cancelling meetings and why someone doesn't keep their calendar up to date (travel!!!).